The methods employed in the prior art for delivering online video to viewers on large video networks do not cater to in-video dynamic image changes. The dynamic changes to a video create new composite video frames within the video by adding or altering new image content. This dynamic property can be used to create viewer specific distinctive content so that changes to the video may be different for different viewers.
Although internet video is highly compressed to reduce transmission and storage cost, the compression techniques focus on eliminating similar data regions both within a frame and across multiple frames. Accordingly, it can be difficult to decompress a video to its original state to facilitate accurate image region modification.
For example, advertising media may require a product image to be placed in an online video in post-production. Product images may require alteration depending on a viewer's preference to ensure, for example, that one viewer is shown a can of Coke while another may be shown a can of Pepsi in the video being downloaded or played. This altered content may be automatically selected based on Internet data from a viewer's product purchase history or internet browsing preference data.
1. Compression:
Traditionally video has been a data intensive use of media, and consumes large quantities of processing time, data storage space, and distribution transmission bandwidth cost. Thus, video is almost always compressed to reduce cost.
A video typically displays 24 to 30 frame images a second to give the illusion of movement, but not everything in the current frame image moves in the following frame. Accordingly, some compression algorithms store incremental changes in several frames in addition to compressing the current image frame. This often eliminates approximately similar regions that are within the same frame and sequences of frames. Compression techniques can reduce file sizes for raw video by a large factor, and use several methods to improve degraded image appearance from the compression processes.
2. Deduplication:
While compression reduces data redundancy within a file, deduplication is a technique used to eliminate substrings of identical data repeated across numerous files. Deduplication stores only one instance of such a data substring, while subsequent instances of this data substring merely reference the saved copy. This process is often applied to transmission and storage operations to reduce data transfer redundancies.
However, many online videos are often cached (i.e. stored temporarily) on a local content delivery server when it is first viewed by a local user. This edge caching is often done to optimize operational efficiency, as transmission costs can be significantly higher than the cost of data storage. For example, when a viewer first watches a specific video on YouTube this video would be transmitted from the YouTube central server to a local server and then onto the first viewer. Thereafter, such video would be cached (or stored) at the local servers for future viewing by additional viewers on the same network or in a close geographical region.